Crooked Little Lies (17 page)

15

J
eff went ahead of her, striding down Prescott Street toward Kim’s Needle and Book Nook, a man on a mission, and Lauren let him. She felt sick with frustration and dread. What was next? Would she forget where she lived? Her children’s faces? Where she’d left them? Would Jeff take her car keys now? Her license? Would she lose her freedom entirely?

Her head filled with white noise.

He stepped off the curb where the Altima and not the Navigator was parked, and walking to the driver’s side, he bent to look in the window. Lauren knew what he would say before he straightened and said it, that the keys were there.

“In the ignition.” He sounded rueful, apologetic.

“That doesn’t prove I drove it.” She clung to the last of her conviction.

“Well, there’s also a scarf on the seat. I think it’s the one that belonged to your mom.”

“No,” she said.

“Come and see for yourself,” he said.

“How would it get there? I didn’t bring it with me. I don’t wear it with this jacket.” She joined Jeff, reluctantly, looking from him to the car. Not directly, because she couldn’t bear catching even the smallest sight of the scarf her mother had brought home one year from Paris. French women had worn scarves for years, her elegant mother had said, winding the length of vintage pale-pink-and-cream silk around Lauren’s neck. “It’s the height of haute couture.” She’d been laughing. “There, my darling.” She had turned Lauren so that she could see herself in the mirror. “Beautiful, no? A runway model should have such a stunning look.”

“I don’t remember bringing it with me,” Lauren said now. “I almost never wear it.” It was fragile. Her mother had said it was from the forties.

“Maybe you missed her. You get it out sometimes when you do.”

Lauren looked up at Jeff. His eyes were soft with commiseration. He circled her shoulders with his arm, pulling her against him, kissing her temple.

She turned her face into his chest. “I don’t remember driving this car. How could I not remember?”

An SUV pulled to a stop behind the Altima, blocking it. Lauren recognized her Navigator, but the red-haired man who hopped out wasn’t Danny. He was older, a complete stranger to her, and she was relieved. The last person she wanted to see now was Danny, after the accusations she’d made against him. He hadn’t heard them; still, it shook her how willing she’d been to blame him rather than admit the truth, which was that she was incompetent.

“You the Wilders?” the red-haired man asked.

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “I hope you brought an extra set of keys for the loaner.”

“Got ’em right here.” He pulled them from his pocket.

Jeff asked him to unlock the door. He retrieved Lauren’s mother’s scarf and gave it to her. He thanked the guy for bringing Lauren’s SUV, and handing the man a twenty-dollar bill, he said, “I’m really sorry for the trouble.”

“Hey, it’s no problem. I know how it is. My wife was pretty shaky when she got out of the hospital, too.”

Lauren stared at Jeff, cheeks burning with fresh mortification and something hotter, like rage. She felt it pulsing behind her eyes. “What did you tell him?” she demanded after the guy drove off in the Altima. “That I was nuts?”

“No. I only said you had an accident a while back. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Lauren. Why do you always take it so personally? Let people help you. Let me help you. It’s all I want to do.”

“It will never be different, will it? You’ll never get past it. Every mistake I make, every time I forget, you’ll automatically assume I’m incompetent or strung out. No matter what I do, you’ll always be watching, checking—” Her voice broke, and she hated it, the loss of control, how it further cemented what seemed apparent, the fact that she was coming apart.

“You think you’re the only one feeling like this fucking nightmare is never going to end?” Jeff glared at her. “What do you want me to say? That this was some kind of joke and you really didn’t drive a loaner into town? No matter what I say, I’m going to be accused of meaning something else.” He walked away, walked back. “You know what your problem is, Lauren? You overthink everything.” He punched his skull above his ears with his forefingers. “You’re in your head too much. It’s making you paranoid.”

“How am I supposed to trust what you tell me to my face when you’re going behind my back, telling people I’m nuts? Huh?” Lauren pushed her hair behind her ears, wiped her eyes, pinched her nose. “How do you think it makes me feel to stand by and listen while you make up excuses to cover up your wife’s crazy behavior? Ha ha ha.” Her voice shot high, a falsetto mockery. “Poor Lauren doesn’t know the difference between the makes and models of cars. Poor Lauren, doesn’t know if she’s driving a car, much less what kind.”

“Jesus.” Jeff rolled his gaze skyward. “This is why I can’t talk to you.”

“That’s all right, because I’m done.” Lauren wanted to end this. If it went on any longer, she thought she might punch Jeff. They would erupt, explode, brawl in the street. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t know her anger was unreasonable. She did. But she still couldn’t help it.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Can I have my keys, please?” she asked sweetly.

He handed them to her. “You sure you can drive yourself?”

She shot him a look.

“Okay, okay.” He backed off, hands raised. “I’ve got to go back to the warehouse and finish up. I shouldn’t be long. You want me to stop and get something for dinner? Hamburgers, maybe?”

“That’s fine,” she said, and when he said he’d see her at home, she nodded, but on reaching the freeway, instead of turning north toward their subdivision, she turned south and headed into Houston.

Why go home? What was the point of trying so hard to be the sane, sober Lauren when, so clearly, she wasn’t that woman anymore? When it was so obvious that the new Lauren couldn’t distinguish reality from delusion.

16

H
ow well do you know her?” Sheriff Audi watched Lauren follow Jeff down Prescott.

“We only met today. She reminds me of my mother,” Annie added after a beat. She was still disconcerted by the resemblance, the way it had seemed to loosen her tongue, making her confide things about herself and her life that she’d ordinarily never admit to anyone, least of all a stranger.

“They do favor each other,” the sheriff said.

Annie looked at him. “You knew my mom?”

“She came to see me a few times. She was concerned about your brother and asked if we would keep an eye out for him.”

Annie wasn’t surprised. Her mother had solicited help with Bo from so many people, including Annie, and in the end, they’d all failed him.

“Sometimes even when you do the best you can, it’s not good enough.”

Annie looked at Sheriff Audi and wondered if he was reading her mind. Or maybe he was thinking of his own failures. “What about the dog Lauren saw in the car with Bo?” she asked. “Couldn’t the vets around town be contacted to see if any of them recognize the description? They might even know the woman or the car.”

“Might be worth a shot,” the sheriff said, but without conviction.

If pressed, he’d talk about his limited resources. He would say as much as he might wish it, Lincoln County didn’t have the big-city manpower of, say, Harris or Dallas or Tarrant County. He would reassure Annie he was doing his best. How many times had she heard him spout the party line on the local news and never paid attention because it hadn’t concerned her.

But there was nothing to prevent her from contacting the local vets with a description of the dog, was there?

“Doesn’t seem like her memory is too good.” The sheriff was looking out at the street, in the direction that Lauren had disappeared.

“She told me she fell and sustained a bad head injury. She still feels kind of disabled, I think.” Even as Annie said this, it didn’t jibe. Lauren had seemed so pragmatic and steady, so down to earth—so like Annie’s memory of her mom. But the Lauren who had dropped to her knees to grope through the contents of her purse for keys to a vehicle she hadn’t known she’d driven had been tenuous and frightened.
Unbalanced
. The word appeared in Annie’s mind. Like Bo could be, Annie thought, but not in the same way.

The sheriff said he knew about the accident. “It’s a crazy business she and her husband are in, taking down those old buildings. Anything can happen.” He started for the door.

Annie caught his elbow. “What about the dog?”

“I don’t know as I’d put a lot of stock in anything Mrs. Wilder said, Annie, you know?”

“But she described the woman to a T. It’s the same description Cooper gave.”

“He didn’t report seeing a dog.”

“No, but maybe he forgot, too, or the dog could have been lying down.”

“I’ll look into it, okay?”

“Fine,” Annie said, and she smiled as if she believed him, as if she didn’t recognize the dismissal in his eyes. Like the deputy earlier, the sheriff didn’t believe Bo was alive, either. His urgency was gone. Even his shoulders seemed to have rounded with his sympathy and regret. It was only a matter of hours before the search would be called off, the command center shut down and the whole calamity forgotten. It panicked and angered her. She wanted to call Sheriff Audi on it, to say
How dare you?
, even as she fought an urge to plead with him not to give up.

He cupped her upper arm with his big palm and said, “Hang in there,” and she bore that, too, and once he took his leave, she went to find JT. But when she got to the kitchen, only Madeleine was there, washing dishes. “He left a few minutes ago,” she answered when Annie asked.

Picking up a towel, Annie joined her at the sink. “Did he go home?”

“No. He’s as stubborn as you are.”

“Look who’s talking,” Annie said.

Madeleine let the water out of the sink. “I’ll go home if you will,” she said.

“Okay,” Annie said. “If that’s what it takes.”

Madeleine looked at Annie, not believing her. “You promise? Because you’ve worn yourself out, and there are plenty of other folks who are doing everything that can be done.”

Annie promised even as she thought there could never be enough people.

“It only takes one to find him.” Madeleine stated a fact.

“It’ll be dark again soon.” Annie stated her own fact, one that happened to be her worst dread. It was true what people said. Terror was more easily managed in the light of day. At night, it ran away with you; it seized your mind, conjuring every worst-case, missing-person scenario you’d ever had the misfortune of hearing about. There were hours, the ones after midnight especially—her mother’s despair hours—when Annie believed she couldn’t take one more breath without breaking from the fear.

Abruptly, Madeleine brought her open palms down hard on the sink’s edge, and Annie flinched. “What is it?”

But Madeleine only shook her head. “Nothing. Just tired and worried sick, like you.”

No,
Annie thought. There was something more complicated than simple fatigue working in Madeleine’s eyes. Something like anguish, maybe. Or remorse? Annie couldn’t sort it out. She thought she was the cause, what she’d said about it being dark soon, and she apologized.

Madeleine wasn’t having it. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

She loosened her grip on the sink’s edge, and Annie saw that her hands were trembling. They were old hands; the backs were covered in the thinnest tissue of flesh and networked in a delicate lace of blue veins. Their fragility made Madeleine seem vulnerable somehow, in a way Annie had never imagined before. She wanted to reach out to Madeleine, but she knew better. There were boundaries, lines of reserve between them that had never been crossed. Annie thought they were there because that was how Madeleine wanted it.

The older woman sniffed. “Such a lot of foolishness.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, turned on the tap and rinsed the sink, then wrung out the dishcloth, and her motions were as crisp and businesslike as the edges of her personality, the parts of herself she would let people see. But who knew what underlay that? Who could know the mysteries of another’s heart?

Annie cleaned the counters, dried a dozen coffee mugs, and set them on a tray. She made a fresh pot of coffee in case someone wanted it, although it being the dinner hour, the center was mostly deserted.

“Would you like to come home with me?” Madeleine spoke in a rush.

Annie looked at her, startled.

She was flushed pink, diffident, stammering. “You—you’ll be alone otherwise.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Annie began.

“Never mind. I don’t know why I asked.”

Annie started to protest or apologize again, she didn’t know which, but Madeleine held up her hand. “Let’s say no more about it.”

“All right,” Annie said, but she was disconcerted. She slipped into her jacket, shouldered her purse, and together they walked out the back door of the community center and into the alley, where they’d left their cars. The sun was gone, the air chilled. The prospect of the coming night pressed down hard on Annie’s shoulders. She thought of Bo’s bare ankles. She thought of the man in the lab coat at the morgue, his blistered-looking, bone-white wrists.

“You’re welcome to come anytime.” Madeleine paused near the battered, rear bumper of Annie’s BMW. “To my house, I mean. Bo comes sometimes. Did you know?”

Annie hadn’t known. “He never told me.”

“He asked me not to tell you.” Madeleine pulled her keys from her purse. “He likes to sit in the garden. I’ve been teaching him the difference between the perennials and the weeds.”

“Huh.” Annie was flustered. The number of Bo’s secrets kept mounting.

“He’ll make a good gardener one day. I told him I’m happy to pay him for his trouble. You, too. We could talk about it once this is over, the three of us.” Madeleine cast out the suggestion, not looking at Annie, and she seemed to brace herself, as if for rejection.

Not that Annie knew how to reply or even what Madeleine was offering. Extra income? A larger role in their lives, that included financial support? A place for Bo to find shelter? Had Madeleine and Bo discussed this? Anything was possible, Annie guessed. She thought of asking for further clarity and couldn’t; she couldn’t think of one thing to say, and after another moment or two, Madeleine seemed to draw herself up. She retreated a step and said, “All right then” and “Good night,” and turning, went toward her car.

Annie watched her go, still unable to find her tongue, the breath for speech.
Wait.
The syllable sat mired in confusion at the back of her throat. She looked up at nothing, upset with herself. She’d hurt Madeleine’s feelings, letting her go without a word. Was it so farfetched that Bo would find solace in Madeleine’s garden, that he would find a friend in her, that she would care for him and consequently care for Annie, too? Was it such a mystery that Bo kept aspects of his life private? Annie didn’t tell him everything, either.

Where are you?
She might have been asking the sky, its vast empty arc.

Annie started her car. The question felt eternal; it felt branded into the wall of her brain.

On her way home, she ran what had become a familiar circuit since Friday, going by the library first. But Bo wasn’t there, and no one had seen him. She shouted his name through the train switchyard and, in response, heard only the lingering resonance of her own voice, the whish of an errant breeze. She called for him softly along the pathways of Greenlove Park, where he liked to lie in the grass under a particular wide-canopied bur oak and write in his notepad. There was no answer there, either, other than a cricket’s uncertain song.

She drove home, but once there, she couldn’t stand the silence, the emptiness. She needed her mother, and all that was left of her was at JT’s. So Annie went there, and for all the sense it made, as she entered the house, she was filled with a hope that was as unreasoning as it was foolish. Because a quick search of the rooms turned up nothing. Bo was no more present in this house than he was in her own, no more present in either place than her mother.

There was nothing of them left other than Annie’s memory of them, and that was fading, slipping from her mind like water through her fingers. The remembrance of their voices, the sound of their laughter, their fragrances—mixed notes of morning toast and spring flowers, laundry soap and sunshine; some wonderful smell that made Annie feel safe, made her feel she was home—all of it was going now, hour by helpless hour, becoming as ephemeral and distant as an echo.

Wandering back into the kitchen, her eye caught on the answering-machine light that was blinking on the telephone at her elbow, the landline JT insisted on keeping because phones were his business, his profession. She hadn’t noticed it before, and watching it now, she was somehow mesmerized. No one called the landline anymore; no one who would leave a message anyway. It wasn’t her phone; who called, the messages they left weren’t her responsibility or even her business, but she picked up the receiver anyway and dialed into the system. The canned voice announced there was one new message, and retrieving it, she heard a human voice, a woman’s voice, sounding hesitant and somehow agitated, introduce herself as Constance McMurray from Rose Hill in Morro Bay, California. She was calling for JT or Sandy Laughlin, she said.

Sandy?
Annie’s heart paused. Sandy was her mother’s name.

Constance McMurray described her need to speak to either Mr. or Mrs. Laughlin as most urgent. “Please return my call as soon as possible,”
she said.

In anticipation, Annie yanked open a kitchen drawer, found a pen and a scrap of paper and jotted down the number where Constance McMurray said she could be reached. The message ended; the machine voice came back, advising Annie what she could do now, but she only stared at the telephone, unable to choose among the options that were offered: save, delete, listen again. She cradled the receiver when the machine started to repeat her choices, and picking up the note she’d made, she studied the name and telephone number.

The memories were too hard for us
. That was how JT had explained moving himself and Bo across the country after Bo’s mother died. Annie looked at her note again. Rose Hill sounded like the name of a cemetery.

She went into the den and turned on the computer, an old IBM PC, a relic leftover from her and Bo’s school days. The desk where it sat was big enough that they’d often done their homework at it together, one on either side. When the home page appeared on the screen, she typed in
Rose Hill,
a plus sign, and
Morro Bay
in the search bar and clicked “Return.” Her fingertips registered the faint stickiness of the keys, raising a memory from the floor of her mind of the day that Bo, in a childish fit, overturned her Dr. Pepper on the keyboard. She’d been working on an essay for her sophomore English Lit class, something loosely based on Jonathan Swift’s, “A Modest Proposal,” and Bo had been doing stupid tricks with a yo-yo he’d gotten for his birthday, needling her.
Lookit, lookit!
His voice was like a dart in her ear.
Shut up!
She ordered.
Get out of here, you little nerd
, she said.

In one half second, he upended her soda can.
Who’s the nerd now?

His long-ago taunt, rough with an edge of something very like tears, rattled off the walls of Annie’s brain.

Why hadn’t she given him the attention he’d craved? Two minutes, maybe less. Would it have been so hard? She remembered spending nearly an hour drying out the keyboard and feeling lucky and relieved to find it still worked.

She remembered she never would have passed algebra that year or geometry the next without Bo’s help.

Rose Hill Community Center was the first entry on the search page, and from the sketchy verbiage that was included there, Annie gathered it wasn’t a cemetery but a mental-health facility. A knot tightened in her stomach. She clicked through to the home page, dotted with photographs, many of them showing people—amazingly normal-looking people—engaged in a variety of ordinary activities. Some were of groups seated in a circle, chatting or playing instruments. There was a shot of a youngish man lying beneath a tree on a grassy knoll, reading a book. Rose Hill’s landscape was vintage university fare. Ivy-covered walls included a couple of turrets. It was bizarre, really, the resemblance that the hospital, or whatever it was, bore to a college campus or a quaint out-of-the-way hotel. The information Annie read made it sound like a spa, a haven, a retreat for the agitated and emotionally distressed. It talked about restoring wellness of mind, body, and spirit. She kept looking for the place to sign up.